Re: qtFRED: What is it and can I eat it?

Oh my... I imagined FREDing in the future FRED as described by that document and I about died with excitement. Yes. All of that.

The problem is that at the moment qtFRED is a straight port of FRED. All that's changed is the interface. So if anything was impossible before because of MFC, then it might be possible to change it (CTRL + whatever is an example of that sort of thing. I did look into it a while back and could never get it to work despite the fact I seemed to be doing everything the MFC documentation told me to do). If the problem is that you'd have to rewrite large sections of FRED, then that's not going to be fixed simply by moving to qt.

Well I mean the document is really just a pie-in-the-sky wishlist without any thought or concern as how easy/possible it is. Definitely qtFRED should be brought up to par before any major changes are done, but it's still fun to dream and think about what features would be nice.

For ages whenever I asked for some alteration in FRED (even if it was resizing a few windows), I always got "let's wait until we have cross-platform FRED running before we change anything", so I hope you'll excuse me that 10 years of belated requests get suddenly posted.

Re: qtFRED: What is it and can I eat it?

One thing qtFRED actually does differently from FRED is that all the dialogs and windows use proper dynamic layouts which means that resizing them is actually possible now. So, at least that can be added to the "more or less done"-list of the FRED wishlist document

Re: qtFRED: What is it and can I eat it?

Well I mean the document is really just a pie-in-the-sky wishlist without any thought or concern as how easy/possible it is. Definitely qtFRED should be brought up to par before any major changes are done, but it's still fun to dream and think about what features would be nice.

And that's fine. I just wanted to make sure that people understood that qtFRED is just the first step towards some of the things on that list rather than actually being about making things on that list happen.

I like the list, but let's remember that cross-platform FRED is a huge benefit to the SCP in and of itself. Obviously we can now attract more FREDders who use Linux and Mac. Less obviously, we can now attract coders from those two platforms. In the past Taylor has commented that better coders than him were turned off the SCP because they felt it was too Windows specific. And I think anyone who remembers the sheer volume of changes Taylor made should realise that is a massive loss.

Re: qtFRED: What is it and can I eat it?

Re: qtFRED: What is it and can I eat it?

I'd like qtFRED 3000AD er... procedurally generated, high fidelity, high realism, $5000 JPEGs of qtFRED er...One basic feature (which I will add to the doc) is for the event editor to not ask if I want to save changes if I close it without actually having done anything.

[6:59 PM] Admiral Nelson: who made the "New Folder" campaign?[7:00 PM] Cobbles: Never heard of that one[7:00 PM] PIe: best campaign name ever[7:00 PM] PIe: I really liked the sequel "Copy of New Folder"[7:01 PM] Admiral Nelson: no way[7:01 PM] Admiral Nelson: Copy of New Folder (2) was waayyy better[7:01 PM] GayShivan: Now now[7:01 PM] GayShivan: Let's talk about the spinoff, Shortcut of Copy of New Folder (3)[6:23 PM] PIe: why do I have the feeling that I shouldn't be able to give orders to 22nd armored hq[6:24 PM] Axem: 22nd armored hq, i order you to get me a cup of coffee[6:24 PM] PIe: and donuts[6:24 PM] PIe: BECAUSE THIS IS THE GTVA POLICE[6:25 PM] Axem: :O[6:25 PM] Axem: am i under arrest[6:26 PM] [`_`]/: no, just please step out of the myrmidon[6:26 PM] [`_`]/: you have so much to fred for

Re: qtFRED: What is it and can I eat it?

Heh I've been half tempted to crowdfund Ryan Gordon to work on the FS2 Fred port.... I can't program in QT worth a damn, I only know gtk/gtkmm and I'm a bad programmer. Hit me up if you need testing on Linux though...

Re: qtFRED: What is it and can I eat it?

I have Macs! I even have one I could offer up remote access to, that I pretty much only use for FSO anyway. And I don't mind attempting to test things regularly if that would be useful. Just wasn't sure that was needed or was in a state it'd be expected to work yet.

Have not tested with the official Qt installer version yet, didn't feel like creating an account. There may be a simpler way to have it find the qt install, or a way to make it not require any special settings with a change to the cmake code, not sure.

Re: qtFRED: What is it and can I eat it?

I do enjoy and benefit from your labor and just because programming for me is like getting my fingernails pulled off my fingers…

Doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate and respect what you do, and sometimes wish I could help. In my limited free time these days I sometimes think I could help and get a little farther each time, usually until it hurts.

Re: qtFRED: What is it and can I eat it?

Small development update here. I finished porting the 1200 lines of code required to get the SEXP tree context menu to work. It should now support all the features of the standard FRED except adding and modifying variables since those operations require new dialogs.

Re: qtFRED: What is it and can I eat it?

Since there is actually something to test now I compiled some test builds: http://swc.fs2downloads.com/builds/test/qtFRED/Only the Windows builds contain qtFRED since our CI is not configured for building Linux or Mac bundles of qtFRED yet.

The notable thing about these builds is (as mentioned above) that the SEXP tree and its context menu should be mostly done now. Please test if they work correctly and are actually doing what you expect them to do.qtFRED will respect the mod options just like FSO and FRED does so you don't need to configure anything special.

Re: qtFRED: What is it and can I eat it?

I just compiled the Linux qtFred and ran it. This is brilliant, been waiting for a Linux native FRED since the Linux port of Freespace 2 got made. Thanks to PCS2 already running on Linux it should now be possible to create entire mod campaigns and art from start to finish on Linux. Been waiting 10 years for this. Thanks to everyone involved.

Re: qtFRED: What is it and can I eat it?

There has been some activity surrouding qtFRED in the past few days. jg18 is working on adding a working fiction viewer dialog and has added the GUI forms for the background editor, the shield system and the voice acting editor. niffiwan has been working on the Asteroid Field editor dialog and I finished porting the code for the event editor dialog to qtFRED. It should now be fully functional so please take a look at that.